The Siberian frontier: the study of the issue in the Russian historical science

This article is devoted to the modern Russian historiography of the concept of the Siberian frontier. The article identifies the regions of Russia which are engaged in the research of the frontier problems (the Volga region, the Caucasus, Siberia, the Far East). Special attention is paid to the history of the study of the issues related to the Siberian frontier. Scholars are eager to compare the colonization experience of the United States with the colonization experience of the Russian Empire in order to apply the concept of the frontier to the Russian history. The most domesticating region of our country is Siberia. The concept of the Siberian frontier develops in comparison of the development of the Western lands of the US and the Eastern lands of Russia. The historian A.D. Ageev from Irkutsk considered the problem of the general and the particular. The application of the civilizational approach can be traced in the work of this scholar. When considering the issue of the interaction between the immigrants and the indigenous people, historians D.I. Rezun and M.V. Shilovskiy singled out three types of the frontier: outer, inner, and intra-civilizational. B.N. Mironov considers the conditions of colonization to be a distinctive feature of the experiences of colonization in the United States and Russia. In the United States it was the domination of bourgeois relations and democratic institutions, while in Russia it was serfdom and autocracy, the development of legal, democratic state and market economy, and only in 1906-1914 it was in conditions more or less similar with the American ones. The historian T.S. Mamsik from Novosibirsk considers the problem of the frontier from the religious point of view, through the questions of the Russian schism and the Anglo-American Quakerism. The peripheries of the Russian Empire were particularly receptive to the radical forms of Protestant beliefs. The idea of a Church without "priesthood", by the model of the Quaker one, was rather attractive to the Siberians. Nowadays the concept of the frontier is interdisciplinary in its nature, and it is used in archaeology, geopolitics, cultural studies, philology and philosophy. The concept of the frontier becomes one of the parts of the research methodology. Thus, the concept of the frontier, being specifically historical at the end of the 19th century, after some time began to be interdisciplinary, applied in various fields of scientific knowledge, and sometimes it does not coincide with its original idea.

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